Thursday, 12 October 2017

Music and War

Many readers of Left Field have told me that the chapter on music and war resonated
strongly with them, so for those who haven't yet read the book, here it is ….The Bible says, ‘In
the beginning was the word.’ Wrong. First there was the rhythm.
From the time of the Big Bang, it is the beat that gives the cosmos
its pulse. All else may be chaos, but it is there in mathematical
time, something primordial.1
In one sense,
however, the Bible is right. Man’s first attempt to communicate
involved rhythm, movement and dance which represented the first
language, the first word. At the time of what Engels called
‘primitive communism’, when Homo
sapiens were
hunter-gatherers, humans signalled to each other by beating stick on
stick, stone on stone. The first vocal syllables were whistles and
calls based on rhythmic patterns which allowed human communication to
take place. Rhythm was there at the start of everything. It was there
at the start of our species and is there at the start of our
individual lives.2
Whether or
not we evolved from the sea, we all emerged from the waters of our
mothers, and water is a perfect transmitter of sound. Place a
waterproof watch under the surface at one end of a swimming pool. Get
there early in the morning when no one else is around. Have a friend
swim underwater at the far end of the pool and ask them what they can
hear. Both the heart of the foetus and that of the mother beat to a
cycle of dash dash, dum dum, dum dum, dum dum. Mother and baby are in
syncopated rhythm. Sounds exterior to the womb may also be heard and
absorbed by the foetus. Many pregnant women will tell you that they
are aware that their babies react to external sounds. So music and
rhythm, or rhythm and music to be chronologically correct, are
central to our lives. It is a physical and emotional link, both to
something in us and beyond us, linking us to the music of the
spheres. Music can move us to
extremes of joy or sadness, elation or depression. Perhaps it is a
piece we associate with some event in our life: when we first kissed,
when we went to our first teenage party, when we first made love.
This musical association is strong in all of us. Perhaps it is with
Mahler’s ‘Adagietto’, Ali Farka Touré, blues, a song sung by
Ella Fitzgerald, an Indian raga, hip-hop or drum and bass. In all
types of music we can be emotionally, and even physically, moved. If you project sound
waves at piles of sand, iron filings, water or mercury, you can
create varied patterns, from spirals to grids. Given the sound
conductivity of water and its high level in the human body, it is
hardly surprising that our cells react to sound vibrations, even
those at the far end of the spectrum which we are unable to hear.
With this knowledge, holistic healers place vibrating forks close to
the energy field of the human body and hospitals use high-pitched
sound to shatter kidney and gallstones. Conversely, the negative side
of the use of sound are experiments undertaken by the US military and
other governments, utilising sound waves as instruments of war. Abu
Ghraib and Guantanamo have shown us that music can be a weapon. Music therapist Olivea
Dewhurst-Maddock has argued that the vibrational energies of
different notes affect different areas of the body. For instance, C
major affects the bones, lower back, legs and feet. D major transmits
energy waves to the kidneys and bladder, lymphatic and reproductive
systems and skin. A major is related to pain and pain control.3
A few years ago, a
friend of mine had major heart surgery. This is what he told me about
his recuperation:
‘My post-operative
experience was quite disturbing. I’d brought some of my favourite
music to listen to in the hospital. I have always been passionate
about classical music. My mother and stepfather were professional
musicians and I was brought up, from the embryo onwards, listening to
Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn and Schubert. Once I was a bit more
than an embryo, I learned to play the piano, cello and guitar. During
the week following the operation, I lost touch with a lot of things –
my sense of taste, smell, my enjoyment of books, but the worst was
being cut off from the meaning of music. Something central to my life
seemed to have died inside me. I would listen to a Mozart piano
concerto; I could understand the harmony and counterpoint, but found
no beauty in it, nor could I appreciate its extraordinary passion and
inventiveness. Listening to Mozart was like listening to Salieri.
That loss and the frequent moments when I burst into tears, for no
apparent reason, convinced me that lengthy and violent operations
have a much deeper effect on our inner selves than medical science
acknowledges. Only part of me was put to sleep. Many levels of my
subconscious and my body were awake when the knife cut me open. They
went into a state of shock. They switched off. They needed time to
mourn. My enjoyment of music now, three years later, is even more
intense than before. I don’t know if that comes with age, or
whether it is the result of the operation, but it is now a passion
only second to my closest relationships.’ Perhaps it is for this
reason that in ancient Egypt, the hieroglyph for music was also that
for well-being and joy. But what about music in non-joyful
situations, in war? When the lights go out and all that is left is
hunger and the threat of death, you will still find music. In 1993 and 1994 I was
in cellars in Sarajevo and Mostar. Shells were exploding, the snipers
were at work, but people – particularly young people – gathered
together and, if they could not listen to music as there was often no
power, they played it. The louder the shelling, the louder their
music. It was an expression of defiance, a testament to the survival
of the one thing that kept them human in an inhuman situation – the
primordial language of rhythm and music which connected them to their
essence. A young soldier in
Mostar visited me after his time on the front line, a Kalashnikov on
one shoulder and a guitar on the other. He tapped the guitar and told
me, ‘A much better weapon.’ This young man faced his former
classmates across a narrow street, playing music to them when it was
too dark to fight. Cigarettes were thrown into the building where he
was crouching as he performed for his enemies. Just before the war
ended in 1995, I helped smuggle a Bob Marley photo exhibition into
East Mostar. Sponsored by Island Records, we took in tapes and CDs
with the photos. The local war radio station broadcast these non-stop
for two days from their cellar studio. The exhibition opened
underground on the front line. I will never forget how the town
pulsed to Marley’s rhythms in the middle of the thuds from incoming
shells. These are examples of
overt and easily recognisable influences of music in extreme
situations: music as defiance with an external enemy in mind. But
what of the influence of music in relationship to the enemy within?
What is its effect on the disturbed and traumatised minds of those
who have been too close to the barbarism of war, who have shot and
killed, have been shot at and wounded, physically and emotionally?
Who have seen friends die, who have lost mothers, fathers, brothers,
sisters? The PMC was constructed
in East Mostar, a part of the city that had been devastated by two
consecutive wars: first in the war of the whole town against Serb
forces, then in the much worse war between the Croats on the west
bank of the Neretva River and the Bosniaks on the east: former allies
that had once formed an alliance to defeat the Serbs. When the Croats
brokered a secret deal with the Serbs, the Croats turned on the
Bosniaks. Thousands of families were driven into what became a ghetto
on the east side of the Neretva River. The term is ‘ethnic
cleansing’, but a more accurate phrase would be ‘ethnic
purging’.4
The Bosniaks
were forced to live in cellars for ten months, eating grass soup and
emerging into the streets only to collect water and, in the case of
the young men, to fight. When the Anne Frank exhibition arrived at
the Centre in 1998, I was asked to say something at its opening.
There was not much to say, only that the Mostar Ghetto had contained
thousands of Anne Franks.5
The Centre allowed the
healing power of music to enter this community. The young were
particularly affected by the war and, from the day the PMC opened its
doors, they flooded in. Some of them used music to escape their
darkest memories. They would tell me that only when they played, or
heard music, could they escape their nightmares. Children and young
people were brought together to make and listen to music: to sing, to
beat drums, to strum guitars, to act and react together through
music. These workshops took on a structured form, thanks to the work
of Nigel Osborne. This was to quickly develop into our successful
schools’ outreach programme. The first schools’
project was called ‘The Oceans’. First, our teachers started with
the Neretva which flows through the centre of Mostar. They went to
the schools and took with them music from the banks of that river –
Croat, Serb and Bosniak songs. On the next visit, the theme became
the Mediterranean because the Neretva flows into that sea: Tunisian
love songs, flamenco, French, Italian and Greek music. Next, the
Atlantic because that is the ocean into which the Mediterranean
flows: everything from Brazilian, to blues, to Celtic and West
African music. Then the Indian Ocean and, finally, the Pacific. The
children became aware that they did not just live in Mostar, or more
specifically in the small ghetto of East Mostar, but that their town
and river had links to the world. At the opening of the
Centre, some of these children performed a Hawaiian boat dance for
Pavarotti. After his long and hazardous helicopter journey across the
Balkan winter skies, the Maestro looked puzzled, not knowing why
these children had chosen a dance so foreign to their experience. The Centre employed more
than 30 young musicians who travelled to schools and kindergartens in
Mostar and the surrounding villages to bring music into the lives of
the children. Centre staff also worked in special needs’ schools,
the Sarajevo Blind School and in the Srpska Republika. The Music Therapy
department, staffed by the first resident music therapists in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, worked with the most disturbed and distressed
children. The results were amazing and a credit to a small, dedicated
department who achieved so much in a damaged town with its equally
damaged population. This small team were responsible for
groundbreaking work. Traumatised children were treated and, on
occasion, responded so well that some of them ended up joining the
Centre’s more mainstream activities. For some in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, much that happened at the Centre was dangerously
political because music was being used to counter cultural
exclusiveness – what I call cultural incest when expressed in its
most extreme form. Negative and threatening music comes from this
tradition: national anthems and military marching songs. To the
contrary, the best music, as with the best art, architecture and
whatever else expresses human creativity, comes from cultural
mixing.6
Göring once
said, ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.’ I would
counter that with, ‘When I hear the word gun, I reach for my
culture.’ This attempt to
universalise music and culture at the Centre was deliberate and
methodical. For the first two years of our work, Eugene Skeef was
responsible for setting up what became African percussion workshops.
On Sunday afternoons, you could find up to 60 children and young
people taking part with djembes,
maracas, handbells, marimbas and wood blocks. These workshops were
developed, both at the Centre and, as part of the outreach work, at
orphanages and hospitals. After the first half hour of drum tuition,
I saw very young children express rhythmic talent as if it were
latent in their essence and being. On a recent visit to the
USA, I came across an article by Feeny Lipscomb, drummer and writer,
who wrote, ‘Recently, medical research has testified that drumming
produces an altered state similar to meditation, thereby reducing
stress. Drumming is also a right-brain activity which increases
intuition, shuts down the ‘rational’ mind, and centers us in our
hearts... I have often heard drumming compared to the high produced
by endorphins. In fact, many people have taken up drumming because
they’ve heard it’s a way to get the same endorphin-produced high
without running and/or doing aerobics.’7
For millennia, shamans
have argued that drumming is ‘the horse that takes you to the
gods’. The state induced is a type of meditation and, in fact, the
Centre offered meditation classes after an acupuncturist at the
Centre was asked to teach it by her patients. Through Chinese
medicine and meditation, the practitioner achieved some extraordinary
results: helping the traumatised sleep for the first time in years,
curing migraines, helping stroke victims and the wounded. From the start, the
ethos of the PMC had been to make a difference, not just in terms of
the type of aid work that was carried out, but also the reasons why
it existed. It is time that we question those aid programmes which
lead to dependency and ensure the continuation of the outstretched
hand. This form of aid becomes an appendage to war and does not
address the larger questions of physical, spiritual and psychological
reconstruction needed to minimise the possibility of future wars. Europeans travel to
Africa to teach the people how to grow their crops. One of the places
they go to is in the Rift Valley, where agriculture was practised
before Europe was populated. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying
they should not be there doing what they do, but they should be aware
of the history, economics, culture and politics of the people they
have come to help. If to this is added a passion for justice and,
dare I say it, an understanding of the need for political change,
then their work can be more than a ‘flash in the pan’.8
In the words of Eugene
Skeef, ‘The destruction visited upon the planet in the name of
advancement is more than sufficient proof that those of us whose
basic education and development was fired in the Western mould need
to exercise a rare humility before proceeding to administer aid to
others. We all know that the so-called First World (strange notion
this, if we are to accept Africa as the birthplace of human
civilisation) has a great deal to learn from the so-called Third
World, if they can just step back, join the circle and let someone
else lead the song with a different rhythmic melody.’ It was my hope that the
Pavarotti Music Centre could be a resource centre for a worldwide
music-based project whose purpose would be to sustain the lives of
those traumatised by war and conflict. To join and widen the circle. Here is what I wrote on
the first birthday of the PMC:
‘One year old, the
Pavarotti Music Centre has surpassed all expectations. A schools’
music programme working in more than 20 schools, kindergartens and
special schools, the first music therapy department in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, a hospital outreach programme, a music school, a
busy recording studio, a rock school, percussion workshops, guitar
classes, a youth choir, drama workshops, dance and ballet, concerts
and exhibitions, even acupuncture and meditation. Above all else, a
place where children and young people can find themselves and their
friends. In the middle of this damaged country, this wounded town,
and working from within that town’s ghetto, we have done what no
politician would dream of doing – produced solutions to political
problems by ignoring politics altogether. We have let the music play.
Of course, none of this was possible without the generosity of the
many musicians who performed at the Modena concerts, none of this was
possible without Brian Eno and his wife, Anthea. And none of this was
possible without Luciano Pavarotti. But with them alone, we would
have a building. We needed a ticking heart. That we found in the
young people of Mostar who have dedicated themselves to making this
place a success. And we have found it in the international workers
here who seem, like me, to have fallen in love with the earth upon
which the Centre stands.’ [An
abridged version of this chapter was published in the European
Journal of Intercultural Studies,
Vol. 10, No. 3, 1999 and in The
Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism,
The University of Kansas, Fall 2000, Vol. XV, No. 8] NOTES1
Western
orchestral music would not have been possible without Pythagoras’
visit to a blacksmith. Hearing a hammer strike an anvil he asked if
he could weigh the hammers. He found that one was two- thirds the
size of the first. He showed that by continually dividing by
two-thirds, an infinite spiral of notes emerges. He had hit upon
‘natural
harmonics’. He concluded that the cosmos was a harmonic ratio, that
we lived in a musical universe and that music obeys the laws of
physics.2
Look
at the honeybee to see how this is true for beings other than
mammals. In Following
The Bloom: Across America with the Migratory Bee Keepers, Beacon
Press, Boston 1991, Douglas Whynott says that bees produce ‘sustained
wing vibrations and measured sound pulses. Tempo corresponds to
distance. [Bees] remain in the hive dancing through the day and into
the night, altering the straight run to create a gravity symbol that
refers to the sun’s position on the other side of the earth – a
position the bee has never seen.’ 3
Book
of Sound Therapy, Olivea
Dewhurst-Maddock, Fireside 1993. 4
The
International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights acknowledged in
their 1993 report that ‘what is taking place in Bosnia-Herzegovina
is attempted genocide – the extermination of a people in whole or
in part because of their race, religion or ethnicity’, with the
international community (the parties to the Geneva Convention and the
United Nations) ‘displaying nearly incomprehensible incapacity;
having failed to put an end to a war between one of the best equipped
armies in Europe and a civilian population, who were neither
psychologically or physically and materially prepared for it.’ 5
My
opening remarks made at the Anne Frank Exhibition, PMC, September
3rd, 1998: ‘The
PMC is honoured to host the opening of the exhibition. On a personal
note and, as one born right at the end of the Second World War, my
politics, in fact my presence here at the PMC, has been shaped by
Anne Frank. My father was one of the first British doctors to enter
Bergen-Belsen and I still have his photographs of the emaciated
survivors imprinted on my brain. He told me that he had been ashamed
at how many died after Liberation because British soldiers fed the
people too much, too quickly. Anne Frank would recognise Bosnia and
Herzegovina. We should not hide from the facts. Nothing was learnt
from her experiences and we sit here today in the Mostar Ghetto, a
place where thousands of Anne Franks ate grass soup for ten months at
the worst time of the war. We also sit inside a European country
where events took place which were the equal of those that happened
during the time of the last European Holocaust. It is to our shame
that the same speeches were made, the same eyes were averted, Munich
went transatlantic. And it goes on. The twentieth century has been
the century of Anne Franks. From the Armenians at the beginning of
the century on to the Nazi terror, the Stalin Gulags, Cambodia,
Rwanda and onwards to Iraq. It has been estimated that in the last
decade we have had millions of Anne Franks: two million children
killed in wars, four million orphaned and some ten million
psychologically traumatised. One survivor of Auschwitz, Bruno
Bettelheim, said that there is no meaning at all to life but we must
behave as though there is. Anne Frank lived that dictum almost to the
end of her short life. If she was here now – perhaps she is here
now in all of us present – she would understand and enjoy what we
are doing here.’ 6
‘Music
is the weapon’ declared the Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti
(from the 1982 film about Kuti of the same name by S Tchal-Gadjieff
and J-J Flori). Aware of that fact, politicians around the world use
music and musicians to achieve their goals or try to control
musicians who they perceive as a threat to their power; the treatment
of Kuti, for example, in Nigeria or Victor Jara in Pinochet’s
Chile. Even instruments are sometimes seen as a threat and are
banned. 7
‘Your
Child’s Brain’, Newsweek,
February
19th, 1996, presented evidence for the brain’s need for rhythm. The
article described the stress produced when the brain is deprived of
this basic need.8
For
those interested in the aid debate as applied to former Yugoslavia, I
would recommend Barbara E. Harrell-Bond’s ‘Refugees and the
Challenge of Reconstructing Communities Through Aid’,
in
War
Exile, Everyday Life,
published by the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research,
Zagreb. For an overall political perspective, see Noam Chomsky, World
Orders and other writings on Cold and post-Cold War International
Politics.